Dreamweaver Oxford

This month’s meeting is from the Flash User Group but a lot of you will probably be very interested in this. The Dreamweaver group will kick off properly at the March meeting (25^th March).  In the meantime can I encourage you all to sign up on the Adobe Groups site, as a lot more of our activity will be taking place there this year.

http://groups.adobe.com/groups/6c54b074f9/summary

Flash Oxford, Friday February 26th

7.30pm at OFVM / Film Oxford

After an extended Christmas break the Flash User Group starts afresh this Friday. We have been working hard to come up with monthly themes to take us through the year. As ever we are hoping to cater for a wide range of Flash users and provide an opportunity for informally meeting other Flash users. We also will continue our regular software give- aways.

This month we will look at Camtasia. This is a screen recording software suite that allows you to record a presentation or tutorial to a video file. You can then edit and save the result as flash web page.

There are some great features in this package and John Twycross will demonstrate how to use it and also how he has used it to teach animation. TechSmith, the makers of the software, have given us a free copy of Camtasia and Snagit to give away on the night.

Tim Watts will be introducing a competition to take place of the Adobe software raffle entitled “Slapdash”. The winner of the competition will win an Adobe software bundle worth over $2000. More details will be revealed on the night.

Finally to round off the night we will have a Flash Surgery. This is an opportunity to ask for help or advice on any projects or ideas you are working on. Feel free to bring along any work to show. This is an open session where you should not be embarrassed to ask questions and join in the discussion.

We hope to see you there.

John Twycross | Flash Oxford

email@flashoxford.com

http://www.flashoxford.com

Venue:

OFVM Film Oxford
54 Catherine Street
Oxford
OX4 3AH

Welcome back!

I hope you’ve all recovered from December’s session by now. There were even a few slices of pizza left at the end of that great evening! Thanks especially to the Brothers McLeod for a brilliant double act.

You’ll be relieved to hear that we have a date for the January meeting of the Adobe User groups. The Premiere and Post group are holding their first meeting on Thursday 21st January at 7.30pm at OFVM as usual.

Here’s what Richard Duriez and Gary Shenton (the manager and co-manager) have to say about it:

FREE EVENT

For the first meeting of the year the Adobe User Group Premiere and Post will be having demonstrations about particular aspects of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

• Using sound compression
• Nesting
• Blend function

We will also be looking at the amazing playback and rendering engine for Adobe Premiere Pro called Mercury Playback Engine.

For further information contact production@ofvm.org

Who should attend?

Those using Premiere Pro, After Effects and other Adobe post production software in a professional capacity.

So, even if you’re not involved in those products, regulars might want to come along and relieve some of the snowy gloom.

OFVM Adobe Groups page

Premiere and Post Adobe Groups page - sign up with your Adobe ID here.

Fabulous news, our guest animators have confirmed they will visit us on December 17th for our final meeting of 2009.

The award winning, BAFTA nominated Brothers McLeod (Greg and Myles) have a track record in creating animation for TV, web, and film. They are represented by Aardman Animations as Commercials Directors and have directed campaigns for Skittles, Stena Line, and Guinness amongst others. They have written and directed series for BBC (Pedro and Frankensheep) and Tate Galleries (Art Sparks), and written for a range of TV, Games and web projects (Noddy, SpongeBob SquarePants, NHS Relationships and Sex). They have a well established YouTube channel and have had several internet successes including Spamland and Fuggy Fuggy which was picked up by MTV and Mondo Media. In 2009, they were nominated for a BAFTA in the Short Animation category for their film Codswallop.

Check out loads of their animations online on the Brothers McLeod web site, You Tube channel, subscribe to Twitter updates, oh all of that!

As it’s the Christmas period, we’ll be having pizza, beer, juice and anything else you can bring yourself, and running the Dreamweaver group Adobe software raffle ($2,000 dollars worth up for grabs).

And please bring along your own short animations to show us too, to keep with the animation theme for the evening, or just be prepared to show us your favourite online animation.

Here’s the deal: a one minute recommendation or presentation = one pizza meal!

When: Thursday December 17th 7:30pm – 9:30pm, and afterwards most likely at the Rusty Bicycle pub.

Where: OFVM, Film Oxford. Map here: http://bit.ly/ofvm-loco

In November at OFVM Film Oxford the Adobe User Group will focus on imaging software, and the Flash User Group are visited by Mike Ellis who will talk about LiveCycle.

Since the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, they have been busy integrating the Flash and PDF technologies. The best example of this is their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite platform. Livecycle is a J2EE server based platform for delivering improved user experiences and document automation. It is an area that runs in parallel with the main developments in the Flash platform so this session will be of interest to Flash and PDF developers/designers alike.

The presenter, Michael Ellis, formally of Adobe Systems, has now set up a company focused on the use of Livecycle. He will explain what the platform is, how the underlying technologies are being used, and why this is very relevant to those interested in Adobe technologies.

Alun Ward will take us through Photoshop.com the Adobe tool for editing images online and integrating with online photo collections like Flickr.

Glenn Clarkson will show how he created an award-winning presentation for a housing association using Illustrator, Photoshop and PowerPoint.

Bring along a friend or colleague, there will be lots of opportunities for networking with likeminded creatives.

OFVM Film Oxford are here: http://tiny.cc/yTEyB

P.S. A little local band promotion:  Les Clochards are performing free at The Chester Arms, off Iffley Rd, not too far away, from 9pm on.

In November at OFVM Film Oxford the Adobe User Group will focus on imaging software.

Alun Ward will take us through Photoshop.com the Adobe tool for editing images online and integrating with online photo collections like Flickr.

Glenn Clarkson will show how he created an award-winning presentation for a housing association using Illustrator, Photoshop and PowerPoint.

Glenn will also show the beta release of Lightroom V3.

In addition, in response to members’ requests, we shall be visiting Lynda.com to look at Using Masks in Photoshop.

If you have any specific areas of these tools you would like to have covered please let us know (info@dreamweaveroxford.com).

Bring along a friend or colleague, there will be lots of opportunities for networking with likeminded creatives.

See you there.

Advance warning of our December meeting. Thursday December 17th, 7:30pm, OFVM Film Oxford, Christmas social and guest animators.

Keep up to date with the User Group and RSVP please at the Adobe Groups site.

OFVM Film Oxford, can be found here:

http://tiny.cc/yTEyB

We had a great night on Wednesday thanks to Steve Newberry who drove down from Adobe HQ to give us a whirlwind tour through some of the timesaving devices in Illustrator, Bridge, Photoshop and Flash CS4.

I noted down just two of the millions of tips, feel free to send in the ones you remember if you were there.

In Bridge, Ctrl-Space-B (PC) on a selection of images brings up the ‘cover show’ cycle of images full screen. Very nice.

Photoshop: zoom even when using the Hand tool on a pic by pressing Ctrl, phew!

Then we had a quick tour through Adjustment layers in Photoshop – for the casual user, which must still be me then.

Content Aware Scaling – a reminder of this amazingness. How many times could I have used that recently if I’d remembered it was there!

Examples of 3D  usage – only available in Photoshop Extended, however, along with video editing and medical imaging.

In Design: we had a pretty in-depth example of exporting an In Design document to SWF and to XFL format, an interchange format which brings all the design imagery and text through correctly preserved, ready to play with in Flash CS4. We looked at FLYP – a more complex online magazine format.

We watched a quick preview movie from Russell Brown about potential Photoshop developments. If you like his quirky presentational style, he’s all over the web.

Steve answered a bunch of your questions and was both helpful and entertaining, so it was a great night.

A reminder that the next User group meeting is on Friday November 20th, but there’s also a soft-launch of the Premiere User Group on November 12th also at OFVM.

This month, the Adobe User Groups have Stephen Newberry, Technical Resources Mananger at Adobe HQ (UK), coming to talk to us about all things Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, at OFVM.

If you have any pressing topics you’d like covered, do let Alun know as soon as you can (info@dreamweaveroxford.com).

You can find out a bit more about Stephen at Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewberry

There’ll be time for questions after his presentation, and the usual chat with likeminded creatives from the Oxford area.

Keep up to date with the User Group and RSVP please at the Adobe Groups site.

Advance notice too of next meeting in November: Friday November 20th.

OFVM, Oxford, can be found here:

http://tiny.cc/yTEyB

See you there.

Hot footing from Flash on the Beach in Brighton, Chuck Freedman from Ribbit.com (the day job) talked about his microphone app for Flash which uses a C application and merapi (application by Adam Flater of Roundarch) which is a bridge between C and AIR, to talk to Flash.

The problem in Flash currently is that stereo microphone input is not supported natively, and that there’s really not much you can do with the audio feed other than check activity levels.

Chuck showed us a way to use a C application to analyse data from a stereo microphone attached to his laptop, and change values in a Flash application accordingly.

There’s some other fantastic stuff out there utilising microphone input, in particular everyone loved the microphone leaves SWF by Bartek Drozdz on EverdayFlash.co. Plug in your mic and try:

http://www.everydayflash.com/flash/pv3d/leaves/

The work that Chuck has been doing will be up and Open Source very soon he promises, but in the meantime you can add your support in the call for Adobe to open up microphone data to Flash via the bugs site on Adobe. Read about the campaign at getmicrophone.com then sign the bug list at http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1766 (You’ll have to register)

Thanks Chuck! His blog is at http://www.chuckstar.com/blog/

Good morning!

We’ve fixed the dates for the next batch of User Group meetings now, so put these in your diary:

• Thursday 24th September
• Wednesday 21st October
• Friday 20th November
• Thursday 17th December + Christmas party

Then we’re back in 2010 on January 21st for the first ever Premiere User Group meeting, followed by Feb 26, Mar 25, Apr 22, May 19 and June 23.